“He pitched for it. Funnily enough, we’d just had our monthly meeting and decided we wanted to do something on the Hatters. Anniversaries, reunion tours and things like that are usually a good excuse for a reappraisal, or a new revelation.”
“So he rang you?”
“Yes. Just when we were about to ring him. He’d written about them before, only brief pieces and reviews, but insightful. Look, I can give you a few back copies, if you’d like, so you can see the kind of thing he did.”
“I’d appreciate that,” said Banks, who knew that he had probably read some of Barber’s pieces in the past. But he didn’t keep his back issues of MOJO. The pile just got too high. “What was the next step?”
“We had a couple of meetings to sharpen things up and came up with a tight brief, a focus for the piece.”
“Which was to be Vic Greaves?”
“Yes. He’s always been the key figure, the mystery man. Troubled genius and all that. And the timing of his leaving couldn’t have been worse for the band. Robin Merchant had just drowned, and they were falling apart. If it hadn’t been for Chris Adams, they might have done. Nick was hoping to get an exclusive interview. That would have been a real scoop, if he could have got Greaves to talk. He also wanted to do something on their early gigs, before Merchant died and Greaves left, contrast their style with the later works.”
“How long would it take Barber to write a feature like that?”
“Anything from two to five months. There’s a lot of background research, for a start, a lot of history to sift through, a lot of people to talk to, and it’s not always easy. You also have to sort out the truth from the apocrypha, and that can be really difficult. You know what they say about the sixties and memory? What they don’t say is that if people can’t remember it, they make it up. But Nick was nothing if not thorough. He was a fine writer. He checked all his facts and his sources. Twice. There’s not a Mad Hatters gig he’d leave unexamined, not a university newspaper review he wouldn’t dig up, not an obscure B-side he wouldn’t listen to a hundred times.”
“How far had he got?”
“Hardly begun. He’d spent a week or two driving around, making phone calls, checking out old venues, that sort of thing. I mean, a lot of the places the original Hatters played don’t even exist anymore. And he might have done a bit of general background, you know, browsed over a few old reviews in the newspaper archives at the British Library. But he planned to get started on the main story up in Yorkshire. He’d only been there a week when… well, you know what happened.”
“Had he sent in any reports?”
“No. I’d spoken to him on the phone a couple of times, that’s all. Apparently he had to go into a public telephone box over the road to ring when he was in Yorkshire. He didn’t have any mobile signal up there.”
“I know,” said Banks. “How did he sound?”
“He was excited, but he was also very cagey. A story like this – I mean if Nick could really get Vic Greaves to open up about the past – well, if someone else got wind of it… you can imagine what that would mean. Ours can be a bit of a cutthroat business.”
“We really need to know where Vic Greaves lives,” said Banks.
“I understand that, and if I knew his address, I’d tell you. Nick mentioned a village called Lyndgarth in North Yorkshire. I’ve never heard of it, but apparently it’s near Eastvale, if that’s any help. That’s all I know.”
Banks knew that he ought to be able to find Vic Greaves in Lyndgarth easily enough. “I know it,” he said. “It’s very close to where Nick was staying. Walking distance, in fact. Do you happen to know if he had already spoken to Greaves?”
“Once.”
“And?”
“It didn’t go well. According to Nick, Greaves freaked out, refused to talk, as usual, sent him packing. To be honest, I very much doubt you’ll get any sense out of him.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Nobody knows. He went strange, that’s all. Has been for years.”
“When did Nick talk to him?”
“He didn’t say. Sometime last week.”
“What day did he phone you?”
“Friday, Friday morning.”
“What was he going to do?”
“Talk to Greaves again. Work out a different approach. Nick was good. He’d simply tested the waters. He’d have found something to catch Greaves’s interest, some common ground, and he’d have taken it from there.”
“Have you any idea,” Banks asked, “why this story should have cost Nick Barber his life?”
“None at all,” said Butler, spreading his hands. “I still can’t really believe that it did. I mean, maybe what happened was nothing to do with the Hatters. Have you considered that? Maybe it was an irate husband. Bit of a swordsman, was our Nick.”
“Any husband in particular who might have wanted him dead recently?”
“Not that I know of. He never seemed to stick with anyone for long, especially if they started to get clingy. He liked his independence. And the music always got in the way. Most of our guys live alone in flats, when you get right down to it. They’d rather be ferreting out old vinyl on Berwick Street than go out with a girl. They’re loners, obsessed.”
“So Nick Barber would love ’em and leave ’em?”
“Something like that.”
“Maybe it was an irate girlfriend, then?”
Butler laughed uneasily.
Banks thought of Kelly Soames again, but he didn’t think she had killed Nick Barber, and not only because of the discrepancy in timing. There was still her father, though, Calvin Soames. He had disappeared from the pub for fifteen minutes, and nobody had seen him return to his farm in Lyndgarth to check the gas ring. Admittedly, it was a bad night, and the farm was off the beaten track, but it was still worth further consideration. The question was, had Soames been hiding the fact that he knew about Barber and Kelly? Banks couldn’t tell. And if he had done it, why take all Barber’s stuff?
When it came right down to it, though, Banks had a gut feeling that it was the Mad Hatters story that got Barber killed. He had no idea why. Unless you were a soul or a rap artist, music was generally a murder-free profession, and it was a bit of a stretch to imagine aging hippies going around bashing people over the head with pokers. But there it was. Nick Barber had headed to Yorkshire in search of a reclusive ex-rock star, had found him, and within days he had turned up dead, all his notes, mobile phone and laptop computer missing.
Banks thanked Butler for his time and said he might be back with more questions. Butler accompanied him back to the lift, stopping to pick out some back issues for him on the way. Banks walked out onto busy Oxford Street a little more enlightened than when he had entered Mappin House. He noticed that he was standing right outside HMV, so he went inside.
Monday, 15th September, 1969
The mood in the Grove was subdued that Monday evening. Somebody had turned out all the electric lights and put candles on every table. Yvonne sat at the back of the small room, near the door, with Steve, Julie and a bunch of others. McGarrity was there, though thankfully not sitting with them. At one point he took the stage and recited a T. S. Eliot poem. That was typical of him, Yvonne thought. He dismissed everybody else’s poetry, but didn’t even have the creativity to make up his own. There was a bit of talk about a concert in Toronto that Saturday, where John Lennon and Yoko had turned up to play with some legendary rock ’n’ roll stars, and some desultory conversation about the Los Angeles murders, but mostly people seemed to have turned in on themselves. They had known the previous Monday that something had happened at Brimleigh, of course, but now it was all over the place – and the victim’s name had been in that morning’s paper and on the evening news. Many people had known her, at least by name or by sight.
Yvonne was still stunned by the signed Mad Hatters LP her father had given her before she went out that evening. She couldn’t imagine him even being in the same room as such a
fantastic band, let alone asking them to sign a copy of their LP. But he was full of surprises these days. Maybe there was hope for him yet.
McGarrity’s Eliot travesty aside, most of the evening was given over to local folksingers. A plump short-haired girl in jeans and a T-shirt sang “She Walks Through the Fair” and “Farewell, Farewell.” A curly-haired troubadour with a gap between his front teeth sang “The Trees They Do Grow High” and “Needle of Death,” followed by a clutch of early Bob Dylan songs.
There was a somber tone to it all, and Yvonne knew, although it was never said, that this was a farewell concert for Linda. Other people in the place had known her far better than Yvonne had; in fact she had sung there on more than one occasion when she visited her friends in Leeds. Everybody had looked forward to her visits. Yvonne wished she could be like that, the kind of person who had such a radiant spiritual quality that people were drawn to her. But she also couldn’t forget that someone had been drawn to kill her.
She remembered the photograph that had slipped out of her father’s briefcase: Linda with an expressionless face and eyes. The pathetic little cornflower on her cheek; Linda not at home; dead Linda, just a shell, her spirit soared off into the light. She felt herself well up with tears as she thought her thoughts and listened to the sad songs of long ago, ballads of murder and betrayal, of supernatural lovers, metamorphoses, disasters at sea and wasted youth. She wasn’t supposed to drink, but she could easily pass for eighteen in the Grove, and Steve brought her drinks like Babycham, Pony and Cherry B. After a while she started to feel light-headed and sick.
She made her way to the toilet and forced her finger down her throat. That helped. When she had finished she rinsed her mouth out, washed her face and lit a cigarette. She didn’t look too bad. On her way out she had to squeeze past McGarrity in the narrow corridor, and the look of cruel amusement on his face at her obvious discomfort frightened her. He paused, pressed up against her breasts, ran one dirty, nail-bitten finger down her cheek and whispered her name. It made her shiver.
When she got back to Steve and the others, it was intermission. She hadn’t brought up the subject of Linda with Steve yet, partly because she was afraid that he might have slept with her, and that would make Yvonne jealous. It shouldn’t. Jealousy was a negative emotion, Steve always said, to be cast aside, but she couldn’t help it. Linda was so perfect, and beside her Yvonne felt like a naive awkward schoolgirl. Finally, she made herself do it.
“Did you know Linda well?” she asked him as casually as possible.
Steve rolled a cigarette from his Old Holborn tin before answering. “Not really,” he said. “She’d gone before I came on the scene. I only saw her a couple of times when she came up from London and stayed at Dennis’s.”
“Bayswater Terrace? Is that where she lived?”
“Yeah. Before she went to London.”
“With Dennis?”
“No, not with him, just at his pad, man.” Steve gave her a puzzled look. “What does it matter, anyway? She’s dead now. We have to let go.”
Yvonne felt flustered. “It doesn’t. It… I mean… I only met her once, myself, and I liked her, that’s all.”
“Everybody loved Linda.”
“Not everybody, obviously.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, somebody murdered her.”
“That doesn’t mean he didn’t love her.”
“I don’t understand.”
Steve stroked her arm. “It’s a complicated world, Von, and people do things for many reasons, often reasons we don’t understand, reasons they don’t even understand themselves. All I’m saying is that whoever did it didn’t necessarily do it from hatred or jealousy or envy, or one of those other negative emotions. It might have been from love. Or an act of kindness. Sometimes you have to destroy the thing you love the most. It’s not for us to question.”
Yvonne hated it when he talked down to her like that, as if she were indeed a silly schoolgirl who just didn’t get it. But she didn’t get it. To her, Linda had been murdered. No amount of talk about killing for love or kindness made any sense. Perhaps it was because she was a policeman’s daughter, she thought. In which case she had better stop sounding like one, or they would be onto her in a flash.
“You’re right,” she said. “It’s not for us to question.”
And the second half of the evening started. She could see McGarrity through the crowds, a dark shadow hunched in the candlelight, just to the right of the stage area, and she thought he was staring at her. Then a young man with long blond hair climbed on the tiny stage and began to sing “Polly on the Shore.”
In a booth in a noisy and smoky Italian restaurant on Frith Street, Banks and Annie shared fizzy water and a bottle of the house red, as Banks tucked into his veal marsala and Annie her pasta primavera. Outside, darkness had fallen and the streets and pubs and restaurants of Soho were filling up as people finished work, or arrived in the West End for an evening out. Red and purple lights reflected in the sheen of rain on the pavements and road.
“You’ve got a lot of explaining to do,” Annie said, fixing her hair behind her ears so it didn’t get in her mouth while she ate.
“About what?” said Banks.
“This Mad Hatters business. I hardly understood a word of what you were talking about before dinner.”
“It’s not my fault if your cultural education is severely lacking,” said Banks.
“Put it down to my callow youth and explain in words of one syllable.”
“You’ve never heard of the Mad Hatters?”
“Of course I have. I’ve even seen them on Jonathan Ross. That’s not the point. I just don’t happen to know their entire bloody history, that’s all.”
“They got big in the late sixties, around the same time as Led Zeppelin, a bit after Pink Floyd and the Who. Their music was different. It had elements of folk-rock, the Byrds and Fairport Convention, but they gave a sort of psychedelic twist to it, at first, anyway. Think ‘Eight Miles High’ meets ‘Sir Patrick Spens.’”
Annie made a face. “I would if I knew what either of those sounded like.”
“I give up,” said Banks. “Anyway, a lot of their sound and style was down to the keyboards player, Vic Greaves, the bloke we were talking about, who now lives in Lyndgarth, and the lead guitarist, Reg Cooper, another Yorkshire lad.”
“Vic Greaves was the keyboards player?”
“Yeah. He was a bit of a Keith Emerson, got amazing sounds out of his organ.”
Annie raised her eyebrows. “The mind boggles.”
“They had light shows, did long guitar solos, wore funny floppy hats and purple velvet trousers, gold caftans, and they did all that other sixties psychedelic stuff. Anyway, in June 1970, not long after their second album hit the charts, the bass player Robin Merchant drowned in Lord Jessop’s swimming pool at Swainsview Lodge.”
“Our Swainsview Lodge?”
“The one and only.”
“Was there an investigation?”
“I should imagine so,” said Banks. “That’s something we’ll have to dig up when we get back to Eastvale. There should be files in the basement somewhere.”
“Wonderful,” said Annie. “Last time I went down there I was sneezing for a week.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll send Kev.”
Annie smiled. She could imagine Templeton’s reaction to that, especially since he had become puffed up to an almost unbearable level since his promotion. “Maybe your folksinger friend will know something?” she asked.
“Penny Cartwright?” said Banks, remembering his last, unsatisfactory encounter with Penny on the banks of the river Swain one summer evening. “It was all long before her time. Besides, she’s gone away again. America, this time.”
“What happened to the Mad Hatters?”
“They got another bass player.”
“And what about Vic Greaves?”
“He’d been a problem for a long time. He was unpredi
ctable. Sometimes he didn’t show up for gigs. He’d walk offstage. He got violent with other band members, with his girlfriends. They say there were times he just sat there staring into space, too stoned to play. Naturally, there were stories about the huge quantities of LSD he consumed, not to mention other drugs. He wrote a lot of their early songs and some of the lyrics are very… well, drug-induced, trippy, I suppose you’d say. The rest of the band were a bit more practical and ambitious, and they didn’t know what to do about him, but in the end they didn’t have to worry. He disappeared for a month in late 1970 – September, I think – and when they found him again he was living rough in the countryside like a tramp. He wanted nothing more to do with the music business, been a hermit ever since.”
“Did nobody do anything for him?”
“Like what?”
“Help him get psychiatric help, for a start.”
“Different times, Annie. There was a lot of distrust of conventional psychiatry at the time. You had weirdos like R. D. Laing running around talking about the politics of insanity and quoting William Blake.”
“Blake was a visionary,” said Annie. “A poet and an artist. He didn’t take drugs.”
“I know that. I’m just trying to explain the prevalent attitudes as I understand them. Look, when everyone is weird, just how weird do you have to be to get noticed?”
“I’d say staring into space when you’re supposed to be playing keyboards is a pretty good place to start, not to mention beating up your girlfriend.”
“I agree there’s no excuse for violence, but people still turn a blind eye, even the victims themselves, sometimes. And there was a lot of tolerance within the community for drug consumption, bad trips and suchlike. As for the rest, odd behavior, especially onstage, might just have been regarded as nonconformist or avant-garde theatrics. They say that Syd Barrett from Pink Floyd once put a whole jar of Brylcreem on his head before a performance, and during the show it melted and dripped down his face. People thought it was some sort of artistic statement, not a symptom of insanity. Don’t forget, there were so many weird influences at play. Dadaism, surrealism, nihilism. If John Cage could write four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, who’s to say Greaves wasn’t doing something similar by not playing? You ought to know this, given your bohemian background. Did nobody at your dad’s place ever paint a blank canvas?”
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